


The Persistence of Memory

by poisonrationalitie



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, POV Third Person Limited, Slow Burn, Soul Bond, Suicidal Thoughts, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:00:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23089759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisonrationalitie/pseuds/poisonrationalitie
Summary: Everything is white, until he lands in a locker with no idea of how he got here. But Shuichi Saihara is the Ultimate Detective, and he's going to solve this mystery. No matter how many times it takes. Happy Birthday Elle!
Relationships: Oma Kokichi/Saihara Shuichi
Kudos: 48





	The Persistence of Memory

**Author's Note:**

> For Elle. Happy Birthday <3

Something twitched in his brain. It only lasted a second, if that. And then the world was searing, white, frying his synapses, ripping apart every twist and fold. His voice was torn away from his throat, but there was screaming. His body felt normal. His fingers wiggled; so did his toes. In the light, a boy’s face melted, purple eyes sagging. 

And nothing.

It was like floating. He’d done that, once. Maybe. Something blue hid in the corners of his memory. Something cold. What was the cold? He felt nothing. Just white. That was all there was, the white.

It stayed like that for a thousand years or so, and then came the dark. And cold. Ice shooting up through his veins, ice on his tongue, between his fingers - all of which he had now. He opened his - eyes, yes, that’s what they were. Eyes. The darkness was lighter, rimmed with green and yellow, patchy in places. He was alive. A word was on his lips, foreign, but it formed all the same, pushing out air in the shape of  _ Kokichi.  _

And then there was light. And a girl. And he’s talking without really knowing what he’s saying, vocal cords trembling before his brain has woken. The files in his brain open slowly, and at first he can only finger the folders. “I’m Shuichi...Saihara.” Yes, that’s it. The folder seems to glow, and he wants to step towards it. But the girl stays in his vision, tantalising. His mind itches. “K..” No, she isn’t Kokichi. Of course not.

“Kaede,” she says, and it feels as though a lock in his brain has clicked open. “Kaede Akamatsu.” He stares at her, frozen for a moment, his joints locking together. One arm rises and adjusts a hat he hadn’t realised he was wearing. There’s a knot in his stomach that seems to be expanding with each breath until it’s a dreadful ache against the constraints of his skin and he thinks he might explode. He rifles through the folders, thrusting his hand deep into each one, clutching at papers and pages and photographs. Each comes up empty. 

And then, like a missile, she says ‘locker’. Another click. Her words stream through his head, his ears ringing. “Kidnapped,” he says, deliberately, tasting the word. His ‘p’ and ‘d’ sound are too close together for his liking. But this is the voice he’s been given. “We both woke up in those lockers. Perhaps we were taken by the same people.” He hardly remembers her telling him that, but his skin tingles as he says it as though someone has lit fire to the little dark hairs up his arms. 

He stumbles through it. The words flee from his mouth unbidden, but his eyes dart and search and scan. The walls seem to be watching him. Waiting. He feels like he’s waiting, too. Even when visited by a parade of candy-coloured teddy bears, there’s no panic rising in him, no fear, hardly even confusion. Each phrase settles easily.  _ Of course,  _ he thinks.  _ Yes, that’s right.  _ Kaede’s eyes are big and her mouth is quick. Maybe his is too. He couldn’t tell you. He glances down at his wrist. No watch. That would be too easy, wouldn’t it? Would it? His fingers close around something black and rectangular and he stares into it. He’s wearing some hat -  _ a detective hat -  _ and a coat, and his nose is pointier than it feels. 

They wander through the building, meeting a few others, and Shuichi commits their names to memory at once. More files light up, now named in dark pen. Kaito. Mui. They walk round the first floor in silence, and he checks each of his teeth with his tongue, just to be sure. Kaede pushes open a classroom door. Shuichi feels as if he is floating again.

But he isn’t. No, he can see, he can feel, his legs work, and he is pulled along into the classroom like food on a conveyor belt. His mouth is dry. His fingers quiver.

“He won’t answer my questions,” the boy says, pouting a little. “I don’t know many robots. I just want to get to know him. What’s wrong with that?”

“You insult me!” the other one says, taller than the boy but still nearly a head shorter than Shuichi. “I do not need to answer your questions.”

“A robot,” Shuichi says. This is important, he knows this bit is important, his bones are on fire. He has to try. “Kokichi?” Neither of them, not the boy or the robot, move. Not even their eyes. There’s no hitched breath, no twitching. They’re both perfectly still. His teeth graze his lip. The knot buried in his abdomen pulses.

“I am the Ultimate Robot. K1-B0. Kee-bo. The finest of Professor Idabashi’s creations.” Keebo. No, no, it was Kokichi, definitely Kokichi. He and Kaede make conversation but his heart isn’t in it, and the purple-haired boy jumps around, prodding at the robot and laughing and his eyes flash –

Oh.

All at once, he remembers the whiteness again, as if he had been submerged in a milk bath. The weightlessness. How it had lasted forever and only a few seconds all at once. There had only been one hint of colour. One glimpse. Melting away. He had never been an arts person – he was the Ultimate Detective, not the Ultimate Artist. Nevertheless, people had stolen art all the time, produced fakes, copies, and it was somewhere between infidelity and murder in rarity. A counterfeit had been made of a Spanish man’s work. The difference had been the hand on the gold-rimmed clock, draped over a block. All of them were melting away, their hands, their numbers, their faces, withering beneath the desert sky. He can feel the sun pouring down the back of his neck, heat dribbling past his collar, burning like molten gold. And in it all, he is frozen, seeing only the eye of the storm, the colour in the final light.

“You’re Kokichi,” he says, and he is flooded. He is surer of this than his own name, than that he is real and this is not all a bad dream. The boy pouts, tugging at the checked bandana round his neck.

“Mostly,” he admits. “I go by other things. Maybe.”

“You  _ are _ Kokichi.”

They find others, and he knows there’s something to it, he takes clips of their faces and names and mannerisms and tucks them away for safekeeping. Things start to work normally. He can feel his feet reaching the floor, his heart beats in normal time. They’re sent towards the gymnasium, and they wait, clustered, and he searches the walls and the roof for clues. But it’s bland; it just looks like a normal high school gym.  He looks at Kokichi again; the boy is a magnet. He’s inches shorter than Shuichi but takes up twice the amount of space, gesturing wildly, bouncing from heel to toe and heel again. Shuichi half-expects him to do a flip.

His mouth is too dry to think, for the next part. His blood turns to slushed ice and his heart will not cease sprinting. At this rate, he will be the first out, first dead, and from a heart attack of all things. No culprit. Unless it could be blamed on the cause for the attack; could the monokubs be condemned guilty? “This must be illegal,” he says, to nobody in particular. “This can’t be right.” His thoughts are echoed in other words and other voices, culminating into a rapid crescendo until the girl to his right explodes.

_ Perhaps she ought to have been the Ultimate Supreme Leader,  _ he thinks wryly, but says nothing. The rest of them settle as she stands tall and proud, encouraging them, speaking as though she was a rare politician – knowledgeable, powerful, and truthful. As much as he loathes to admit it, now that his heart has settled into its beating groove, there is the tiniest thrill of excitement at the base of his wrists. He has solved a murder before. What says he can’t again?

Gonta is perfectly still, Shuichi notices, and seems to be waiting for something. It comes. “Thank you,” he begins with. “I found a manhole in the boiler room. I believe it could be a way out of the school.”

The suggestion is leapt upon like a pack of lions reaching the gazelle. And so they go. In the darkness, hours later, nearly all of them wish they had not. In all of it, his eyes are on Kokichi, even as the others begin arguing, even as Kaede’s voice grows louder and louder. His brain is sparking. He is sure that if he takes his eye off him, even for a moment, for a blink, things will grow out of control. The sense runs through him to his very core. His legs tremble from the effort of walking for so long but his eyes are wide open, watering, stinging. If he has learned anything from his uncle, it is that intuition and logic are not mutually exclusive.

But they are tired. God, they are tired. His memory is funny and curved in places but each step has been taken before, he is sure of it, but he has never been somewhere like this. Not once. The others are failing and leaning against the sides, breath ragged, and he can hardly see. He has to blink. He must. His eyes half-close, and he can still see a swathe of checkers. Then they shut entirely.

And as he watches Kaede die, he knows it is his fault.

He is on fire. His flesh singes and sizzles and crackles and still he goes through the motions, because what other choice is he left with? What is he to do? He has learned his lesson. Wherever possible, he stays by Kokichi, eyes open, ears ringing, until his dreams are filled with purple eyes and he kicks his blankets off, sitting up straight, sweating, panting, certain that the blankets were about to crush him to death. It’s illogical. But Shuichi lets himself succumb to it, just in case.

Kirumi is next. Each one has a sense of a countdown, of an impending doom. He will end this. He has to end this. The tears are burning the back of his irises when he says it. He’s right. Of course he’s right. He’s the Ultimate Detective, after all.

“Does this mean you aren’t my mom, after all?” Kokichi asks, and Shuichi feels as if he has been doused in gasoline. He can’t look. He can’t watch. Afterwards, Kokichi is bawling, and Shuichi wishes he were dead. He should have insisted in the first trial. He should’ve taken it for Kaede. He should have had his neck broken and his face turn purple. That would be better than watching Kokichi cry. Maki holds Kokichi by the neck, and Shuichi’s head spins as if it was him. He really is sick and tired of people being choked.

He can’t think about it anymore. Any of it. It’s as if there is an auto-pilot, cruise-control switch and he hits it. He goes through the motions of each day, one part of his brain whirring, calculating, detecting ultimately. One part is consumed entirely by grief, and he knows that is the part that will stay with him to his dying day. The final part is smaller than the other two, and stranger, and it is an intense preoccupation with Kokichi Ouma. It denotes each little mannerism and widening of the eyes and the different ways he laughs. There’s two more deaths and they cut him into slices, and he doesn’t sleep those nights, staying up and replaying the scenes behind his eyelids, trying to spot inaccuracies, falterings, any slips. He  _ has  _ to get to the bottom of this. There’s no other option.

“Kokichi,” he says, after another sleepless night. “Are you enjoying your breakfast?” Nobody else will talk to him, not with all the stupid fucking torments he puts on.

“No,” the boy says, pulling a face.  _ Squinted eyes, pout, furrowed brows, scrunched nose.  _ “It’s awful. Tastes like ass.” Shuichi has learned not to flinch.

“You’ve eaten half of it,” he points out. Kokichi shrugs, and wiggles his fingers.

“Do you want to play knuckles?”

Shuichi agrees. Kokichi arranges their hands carefully so that their knuckles are interlocking, and explains the rules of the game. Shuichi soon learns that Kokichi is quick, quicker than he ever would’ve thought, and his hands sting and crack and blood wells and dribbles down his fingers. He gets Kokichi only a couple of times, but his hands are still red by the end of it.

“You didn’t quit,” Kokichi says. Shuichi says nothing. The blood runs down his palm. “How brave, Mr. Detective.” Kokichi reaches out, taking his hand with surprising gentleness.

“You need to be careful,” he says, watching as Kokichi inspects the broken skin. “Many suspect you of being the Mastermind.”

“I know,” Kokichi says. One finger touches the blood pooling in the curve between his bones. 

“We have to find a way to end this,” Shuichi says, voice barely above a whisper. Out of habit, his eyes dart to check the room for cameras. None that he can see. His eyes land back, squarely on purple. For a moment, he thinks Kokichi might agree with him.

“Why?” he asks simply.  _ Stupid.  _ “Aren’t you having fun?”

“People are dead.”

“Yes, but you get to solve who killed them. Isn’t it fun, Mr. Detective?” Kokichi digs his nail in. Shuichi rips his hand back, sucking in icy air as the pain screams in his fingers. 

“The deaths of others are not  _ fun, _ ” he says, looking down at the boy.

“But they are,” Kokichi insists, standing on tip-toe. Shuichi is sure that his breath is hitting his cheeks. “You’re enjoying it. I know when you’re lying. You like playing detective. It’s fun!” He smiles, as if they’re arguing over snakes and ladders rather than Miu’s life. He does a little jump, and Shuichi flinches, just stopping them from literally butting heads.

  
  


“I know when you’re lying,” Shuichi says, leaning down. The smallest part of his brain is firing, scribbling furiously. “You didn’t want Miu dead.”

“She tried to kill me,” Kokichi shrugs.

“You didn’t want her dead,” Shuichi says. “You didn’t want her to be trying to kill you.” His nose nearly touches the boy’s. Their lips are only an inch apart, if that. He doesn’t know why he notes that. The only thing important about Kokichi’s lips is that words come from them. 

“Kiss me,” Kokichi says. Shuichi makes a noise in his throat. Then he stumbles back, pulling his head up so quickly it hurts. He feel like his heart might burst out of his chest. 

“Be careful,” Shuichi warns, and turns on his heel. He should’ve known better than to try to intimidate Kokichi. No matter what he does, Kokichi Ouma is always a step ahead. 

  
  


And then he’s gone. He’s gone, and that drumming in his ears speeds up. He can hear a countdown in the skips of his breath. Everyone else falls into an uneasy peace, but the next few days are maddening. He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t sleep, and every waking moment is pierced by the hole that Kokichi has left. And their numbers are dwindling. So many of them have been killed, and he has not been able to save them. He has done nothing for them. Half the time, he has lead them to their deaths, and he will never sleep again. 

Kaito still seems hopeful. Or angry. Or both, all of the above, and his hands shake too much to resist, so he follows the small crew into the gym. At least his senses are still sharp. The Ultimate Power stays, even as his strength and hope and will to carry on leave him. If Monokuma kills him he will be glad for it. He is sick to death of the countdown in his head (to what? What is it?) and watching other people suffer and adding up clues and feeling as if he’s turned every corner at some point before and the niggling feeling in his guts that he needs to search for Kokichi. He is sick to death of being alive in a place like this. 

  
  


So he follows, quiet, watching. And then:

“Kokichi.” He whispers the word like a prayer to the long-dead gods. He is crumbling from the inside out.  _ I knew it,  _ he thinks.  _ I knew you wanted to end this.  _ Each second slams into his temples, his eyes water, he wants to run. For what little life of him is left, he cannot figure this out, this haunting. His heart is in his throat. He joins the little chorus (there’s hardly sixteen of them anymore) in begging Maki to stop. Kokichi drops to the floor, but he’s still smiling. Still smiling. He meets Shuichi’s eyes. 

  
  


A gasp is stuck in his throat.  _ No,  _ he thinks.  _ What are you going to do? You can’t do that. You can’t.  _ It sounds like a final goodbye. Perhaps it is a final goodbye. Why does it matter? Better people than him have died, and he’s not even dead, and yet it feels the worst.

  
  


Everything happens quickly, and at the same time, far too slowly. Their march is either to die or to escape. Perhaps both. The countdown still whirrs away in his head, Kokichi’s files are at bursting point, red and white alarms flash in the corners of his brain. He wants to scream. If he had been a robot, he would’ve overheated by now, but humans were apparently meant to take more than that. They kept filling and filling and filling and filling until they gave up and gave in. Briefly, he wonders if suicide is the ‘off’ switch. And then there would be five, because Kokichi must surely be lost to them forever now. And then they would kill one another until just one remained. Even as they open the metal hatch, he feels no relief. Whatever lay outside will be permanent, definite, once they see it with their own eyes. If he never sees it, he can always hope. Hope that beyond is his normal, boring life, his uncle, a string of cheaters.

But he does see it. Of course he does. There’s never a happy ending, is there? Someone is always cheating, someone is always dead, escape is never to somewhere nicer. His breaths become shorter, quicker. Maybe this is it. Maybe the air is poisonous and he will fall into a sleep and never wake up, all of them will fall asleep forevermore, and that will ruin the game and that will be that. Black spots dance at the corners of his eyes, and take hold. 

He isn’t properly sure if he wakes up. But there’s consciousness once more, and Kokichi is there, monologuing. At least half of it is a lie, Shuichi determines easily. But which half? The other shoe never drops unless you pull it, and at this point, he’s hardly sure which part to pull. His mouth his dry and dusty and he can hardly bring himself to speak. And then he’s taking Kaito, he can’t take Kaito,  _ why why why couldn’t he have never woken up? _

But mysteries always need solving. And so he gives Kokichi the remote, looking right at him until his eyes burn. He wants to reach an understanding, he needs to, if they’re ever to end this. But he’s not sure if they can.

The clocks tick faster. They’re melting, combining, overlapping each other, and he is on the verge. He holds the edges of the sink and thinks. The folders are merging, the files scrambling, and his heartbeat is quicker and quicker. There has to be a truth in this, somewhere. Every lie has a kernel of truth. At some point Himiko sets out, and Maki, and Miu. His vision blurs and his pulse slams against his wrists. There is only so much time. It’s running out.

That’s always it, isn’t it? Lies are quicker than the truth, simpler. Easier to slip into bed with another than go through the heart-wrench of a split, easier to kill than to talk, quicker to run than to fight. He sits down, hands flat against the tiled floor. Quicker to condemn Kokichi than attempt to understand him. Dark spots dance in his eyes, like the pattern of a checkerboard. 

And then there is pain. As if he is being crushed beneath a thousand tonnes, as if he is being flattened down into nothing. He is nothing. There is nothing but white. White and white and white filled in with nothing. He is mixed with the blood of gods and the salt of oceans and the howl of winds. 

But then, he has toes. A chin. Fingers, eyes. He comes into being quicker this time. The Nothing has memorised his blueprint. He is falling, falling, falling, and the hairs on his arm grow quickly and then tremble as he falls. 

“Detective?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! When I started writing this fic, I had actually never seen, played, or read anything to do with Dangan Ronpa. After some quick crash-courses in the tumblr tag, wikis, and some youtube videos, I managed to cobble this together and accidentally sort of fell in love with these two, and this idea has grown a lot bigger than the original one-shot I planned. Please let me know how the characterisation is in the comments! I wasn't sure how I went :P


End file.
